The traditional production of animated film is encumbered with the time consuming and difficult task of creating figures which move with credible fluidity and "humanism". Many cartoon films are produced by the so-called rotoscope technique, in which subsequent live actors and actresses are filmed and a drawing is made of each film frame. Cartoon films which have been produced by this technique include "Snow White and the seven dwarfs", "Cinderella", "Pongo and the 101 dalmations", "Jungle Book", etc. Although this method produces excellent results, it is both time consuming and expensive. In recent years endeavours have been made to simulate human behaviour with the aid of data technology. This task has proven to be almost impossible in practice. It requires the computer to be programmed with information defining the entire body-behavioural patterns of the person concerned. It would require a computer capacity of astronomical proportions to manage a control system of this magnitude.
Partial solutions have been devised, e.g. animating systems which recreate lip movements subsequent to recording speech sound in the computer. If the actor/actress is silent, however, the computer-generated mouth remains closed. Lip animation is rigid and restricted solely to actual speech.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,510,210 describes a technique for producing animated film wherein the movements performed by an actor are fed into a computer, by recording a multiple of optically discernible reference points on the actor in relation to a background reference; wherein the recorded reference points are compared at regular intervals with pre-stored batches of figures drawn in mutually different postures and positions, so as to select the batch which closest resembles the posture, attitude, etc. of the actor at the time chosen, and wherein there is generated from the computer a series of pictures or images of the cartoon figure with a body position or posture corresponding to that of the actor concerned, at the selected recording times. The pictures produced are preferably copied as Xerox transparencies, which are modified manually and supplemented with suitable background material, etc., in a conventional manner, to form cells which are then photographed.
The animating technique described in the aforesaid U.S. Pat No. 3,510,210 has a number of deficiencies which render it unsuitable for the production of high-quality animated film. One decisive deficiency with regard to the area of application envisaged is that the technique only permits 2-dimensional "upfront"-recording of the actor's movements and is therewith limited solely to lateral and vertical movements of the cartoon figure, and also that there are no permissible degrees of freedom which enable the figure to be covered from different "camera" angles. Furthermore, no information is given as to the possibility of computer-integrated processing of recordings of the actor's movements, interaction of the figure with objects and other figures, selection of body assemblage of the animated figure, integration with background, creation of shadows and reflexes, etc. In those instances when these functions are mentioned, it is obvious that they are intended to be inserted manually in a conventional manner, with the aid of the cells formed by producing Xerox transparencies.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,792,243 teaches a method for encoding positions of a mechanism, in which a doll having sections which are adjustable to different angular positions is positioned above a coordinate plate and pickup points of the doll projected onto the coordinate plate are encoded and recorded by a computer. A series of projections of pickup points of the doll placed in different positions may be taken and computer processing can interpolate between poses to produce an animated sequence.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,600,919 teaches a method of making in-between pictures between lay-out pictures, called key drawings. The figure to be drawn has one or more joints and each joint has associated therewith a set of limb-defining vectors. An operator working at a console is able to control the three-dimensional position, rotational orientation and scale factors of a local coordinate system in which the limb vectors are placed. The operator is therefore able to control the animated movements provided by the in-between pictures.